Coelacanth bycatches in the Comoros dropped to near zero. Whether this was because of the DRK's, the fact that older handline fishermen were retiring, because with all the conservation commotion fishermen were afraid to report them, or a combination of these, we may never know. It would not have been due to C.I.TE.S as the fish were not being successfully targeted in the first place.

          One of the perks of operating dinofish.com, was that I would hear from coelacanth enthusiasts from around the world. One such was Michel Reynald, who kept a blog on "coelacanths in out of the way places." Among other accounts, he reported on a pair of professors who claimed to have seen a coelacanth at a fish market in Indonesia. They had made a report to an institution in Paris, but when I inquired further, Michel had no additional information. But this year, 1997, another sighting of a coelacanth in a fish market in Indonesia had taken place. This was by Arnaz and Mark Erdmann. Mark was a young Phd student from California. They were on honeymoon in Sulawesi, and posted a picture of the fish which Arnaz had spotted at a fish market, on a personal honeymoon website, just as a curiosity. They didn't realize coelacanths were not scientifically known from Indonesia. Eugene Balon of the C.C.C. spotted this, realized the significance, and had them take the photo down until a proper announcement could be orchestrated following another catch. For the next year, they must have monitored dinofish.com to see if any word had leaked out. It hadn't and we were all in the dark, until the Indonesian coelacanth appeared on the cover of Nature magazine in the fall of '98. I saw the news on CNN, with Mark's Phd advisor sitting in front of a computer with the dinofish.com website on the screen! This news joined the confirmation of two coelacanths trawled off Madagascar in 1995-7- and the huge female caught off Maputo, Mozambique in 1990, thought at the time to be a stray. The coelacanth universe was expanding.